starwalker

Group decision making is occurring constantly at different levels of complexity and across different scales of space and time; understanding how it works in one context can inform our understanding of other systems that might be more complicated or difficult to explore. By looking at decision making in all of its diverse incarnations, we can step outside of standard modes of reasoning and find new ways to talk about complexity in our ecosystems, our communities, our governments, and our minds. - starwalker from Bookmarklet

people in each generation have done the best they could with what they inherited from their predecessors. As a result, we've ended up trapped in what, in retrospect, look like mistakes. What sensible engineer, for example, would build a sprawling, low-density megalopolis like Los Angeles on purpose? Suppose we could try again. Imagine that Civilisation 1.0 evaporated tomorrow, leaving us with unlimited manpower, a willing populace and - most important - all the knowledge we've accumulated about what works, what doesn't, and how we might avoid the errors we got locked into last time. If you had the chance to build Civilisation 2.0 from scratch, what would you do differently? - starwalker from Bookmarklet

"When it comes to intelligence, the whole can indeed be greater than the sum of its parts. A new study co-authored by MIT researchers documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups’ individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group." - starwalker from Bookmarklet

My vision for the future of money is not really a vision of money at all. It is a vision of a future in which our systems of measuring and accounting for value evolve in ways that better correspond to the complexities of our interactions. In this future we recognize that value creation is motivated in many ways, not only by the accumulation of monetary wealth. We also recognize that value is distributed through many mechanisms, not only through monetary transaction. In this future we take a more comprehensive view of value, commerce, and wealth...we design systems to accurately capture this intricacy and subtlety...and we use these systems to encourage the creation of value in all its forms. - starwalker from Bookmarklet

Though we all create value in many forms, the only sorts of value creation that are are systematically incentivized are those that lead to monetized transactions. The explicit economy has developed around the monetized transaction because it is easily quantified and recorded. Given the built up supporting infrastructure for monetary transaction, the temptation now is to force as much of... more... - starwalker

Polyphonic reality: The notion of an "objective reality" is sometimes useful, but very often a more useful model of the universe is as a collection of overlapping, interpenetrating and intercreating subjective realities - starwalker from Bookmarklet

"The experiment in self-tracking that I’m considering is more about self knowledge than self improvement, though I’m finding it’s hard to separate the two. I’m looking for ways to monitor my personal information flow. I’d like to understand how I get information about the world – through television, the web, radio, email and the people I talk to. The hope is to use myself as a guinea pig, to see what’s possible as far as active and passive monitoring of information flows, in the hope of opening the experiment to a wider population." - starwalker from Bookmarklet

In case anyone is wondering if Social media can drive Social Priorities against Wall Street Priorities, they need not look any further than the cover of the New York Times. Here is a story from the August 31st edition about banks that step away from no-brainer money making business venture because of the social risks to their reputations and therefore, their bottom line. It is obvious that new sources of energy will be hugely lucrative in the future – except when blowing up pristine Appalachian mountain tops or releasing vast CO2 emissions cracking oil from Canadian sands – both perfectly legal enterprises. - starwalker from Bookmarklet

how is form generated? when a Designer becomes an editor of constrains - brilliant talk - starwalker

"Many people when they first hear the term cybernetics, they think of it pertaining mostly to the overtly physical; machines being embedded in our skin, wired to our nervous system. But, cybernetics can also pertain to being something that is mental, requires physical interaction (as opposed to embedded), and/or is based in how a system of things work together. As Andy Clark, a cognitive scientist, pointed out, “we shall be cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts”." - starwalker from Bookmarklet

"Change will not happen by coercion but by enticement, not from above or from below, change happens in hypercomplexity by the flirting ambientation of a few extreme propagators of change such as yourself and many others in our so called niche of futurists pathfinders." - starwalker from Bookmarklet

thanks for posting and reading this, would like to see yr comments - Wildcat

thks for this - Wildcat

much pleasure :) - starwalker

AN end to poverty. A cure for divorce. The elimination of unwed pregnancy. Fifty years ago next month, when the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would approve the oral contraceptive, these were the highest expectations for it. At the same time, few of its promoters in 1960 imagined how the pill, as it quickly became known, would become a powerful tool for transforming women’s lives. - starwalker from Bookmarklet

Technically known as the enteric nervous system, the second brain consists of sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of the long tube of our gut, or alimentary canal, which measures about nine meters end to end from the esophagus to the anus. The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system, Gershon says. - starwalker from Bookmarklet

As Highlander once reminded us, “There can be only one.” And every story we tell is just another rung on that dichotomous ladder, either up or down but always en route to a single, final victory: one dominant political theory, one popularized framing of history, one accepted version of “the truth.” And it has to stop. - starwalker from Bookmarklet

interest motivates people to learn - not for money, not for an exam, but for its own sake, to increase their knowledge just because they want to. This could explain why interest has come into its own in the modern world. It can be seen as a counterbalance to the fear and anxiety that surrounds unfamiliar experiences. Without interest we would shy away from new or complicated things because they tend to make us nervous. "This makes sense if we think in terms of evolutionary history, as unfamiliar situations could often be dangerous," says Silvia. "But in the modern world, it would be disastrous because we couldn't flourish intellectually." - starwalker

"What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks — secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses." - starwalker from Bookmarklet

By tuning the system the researchers observed that the chain of atoms acts like a nanoscale guitar string. Dr. Radu Coldea explains: "Here the tension comes from the interaction between spins causing them to magnetically resonate. For these interactions we found a series (scale) of resonant notes: The first two notes show a perfect relationship with each other. Their frequencies (pitch) are in the ratio of 1.618…, which is the golden ratio famous from art and architecture." Radu Coldea is convinced that this is no coincidence. - starwalker from Bookmarklet

ecological effects are also in play. Ninety-nine percent of GMO crops either tolerate or produce insecticide. This may be the reason we see bee colony collapse disorder and massive butterfly deaths. If GMO's are wiping out Earth's pollinators, they are far more disastrous than the threat they pose to humans and other mammals. - starwalker from Bookmarklet

"Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system. We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded." - starwalker from Bookmarklet

"Would Christianity really be Christianity if people could vote that Christ was not divine? Would Hinduism remain Hinduism if people could throw out reincarnation? (Even in the radically democratic world of open-source computing, Linux founder Torvalds and a few trusted advisors retain exclusive control over the Linux “kernel,” its most important underlying code.) If the beliefs are so arbitrary that majority votes can change them, why believe at all?" - starwalker from Bookmarklet

fascinating.. thx for this - Wildcat

According to the Constructal law, every system is destined to remain imperfect, i.e. with flow resistances The natural constructal tendency then is to distribute the imperfections of the system, and this distribution of imperfection generates the shape and structure of the system. - starwalker from Bookmarklet

"From the FreedomLab Future Studies series, Penny For Your Thoughts" - starwalker from Bookmarklet

Ostrom’s study of governance is not only a source of inspiration, it is also a challenge to libertarians. In study after study, she has shown that the principles of individual freedom, responsibility, entrepreneurial creativity, and resourcefulness apply not only to the production and distribution of private goods, they also apply to a large institutional domain outside the market order. This “third sector,” which is “neither state nor market,” may in fact be as important a battleground for the preservation of a free and prosperous social order as the market itself. - starwalker from Bookmarklet